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Fighting the Liberal Establishment

Updated Oct. 31, 1997 12:01 a.m. ET

Debates in New York City and Houston this week shone a bright light on what contemporary liberalism really means for public policy toward minorities and the poor.

In New York, the union-dominated City Council narrowly overrode Mayor Rudy Giuliani's veto of a Council bill that bans new licenses for commuter vans that compete with city buses. Poor people will be denied an efficient mode of transportation many have been using, and black entrepreneurs could be shut down. It's a triumph for the public-sector union monopoly.

In Houston, the city's largest black newspaper has revealed how the city's system of racial and gender preferences for city contracting has become a playpen for the politically well-connected. Houston-based companies such as Enron and Exxon are spending big bucks to defeat next week's ballot initiative to scrap the program.

Since 1993 the city has sought to award a fixed percentage of city contracts to specified groups. Blacks, Hispanics and women are included, as are Samoans and Sri Lankans. But those of Egyptian or Iranian ancestry are not eligible. Investment banker Ed Blum, the initiative's sponsor, says it would be both more moral and practical to use socioeconomic criteria rather than play a form of identity politics that can't help but discriminate against someone.

Mayor Bob Lanier, who has leaned heavily on businesses to defeat the initiative, openly admits preferences are "a program calculated to remedy discrimination, not poverty." Indeed, the beneficiaries appear to be quite well-off. Among the proposed minority subcontractors for a $200 million contract at Bush International Airport are law partners who do work for the city, a former city councilman and a local state senator.

The Houston Forward Times, a black-owned paper, has courageously exposed example after example of favoritism in the city's preference program. Its coverage prompted the mayor's office to order the city's files on affirmative action closed, except through the time-consuming Open Records Act. Ed Wendt, the Forward's news editor, concluded that "black public officials and political insiders have been winning huge contracts from city, county and state agencies while most African-American small businesses are having problems meeting strict bidding and financing requirements required for the contracts." The Forward's publisher, Lenora Carter, decided not to endorse Mr. Blum's initiative, but her editorial highlighting "preference corruption" was headlined "Bulldoze City Hall."

The campaign to preserve preferences has become an ugly and inflammatory one. Houston NAACP Executive Director Keryl Douglas has called Mr. Blum "fundamentally evil" in public debate. One Houston, the group that says the city's preference programs have contributed to racial healing, is running radio ads on black stations that begin with a sound bite of Martin Luther King. It is cut short by a gunshot and the sound of sirens. The announcer then says, "It happens over and over again. Just when our community starts to move ahead some people try to turn back the clock. Sometimes they do it with bullets. Sometimes they do it with laws. . . . Say No to the forces of bigotry." Elizabeth Spades, a black former Houston schools trustee who supports ending the preferences, says she is appalled by such divisive tactics.

Mr. Blum notes that the same officials who now back Houston's preference program also supported its law against commuter vans--primarily a minority entrepreneur business--until it was declared unconstitutional by a federal judge in 1993. Both in New York and Houston, liberals apparently want to close off opportunities to struggling minority businessmen while creating legal advantages that most benefit well-off and politically wired operators who've been winning the game for years. This is what liberalism has come to, and it's no surprise that the major voices now challenging this setup are coming from inside the black and Hispanic communities themselves.